Newt Gingrich in the end will likely prove to be a gift to Mitt Romney. He was a heavyweight. This isn’t Herman Cain, this is a guy everyone on the ground in every primary state knows and has seen on TV and remembers from the past. But his emergence scared a lot of people—”Not him!’—and made some of them think, ‘OK, I guess I better get off the sidelines and make a decision. Compared to Newt, Romney looks pretty reasonable.”

Mr. Gingrich took some of the sting out of Romney-as-flip-flopper because he is a flip flopper too. He also, for a few weeks there, made Mr. Romney look like he might be over. He made Mr. Romney fight for it, not against an unknown businessman but against a serious political figure whose face and persona said: “I mean business.” In the end it will turn out he was a gift to the Romney campaign, a foe big enough that when you beat him it means something.

Friday, 30 December 2011

This ought to get more hate mail from the Paulnuts than anything we’ve seen to date:

Rep. Ron Paul’s defense of Iran’s nuclear weapons program should surprise no one. The same resentment motivates Ron Paul and the Iranian leadership — a paranoid hostility toward a world that is swiftly changing and has little mercy, and a Millenarian desire to return to a mythical, untroubled past. Get rid of the Federal Reserve, scourge the bankers, return to a gold standard and erect a wall around the United States — and we will return to when? To 1957, when the Russians launched the first space satellite, alerting the United States to the danger that it might lose the Cold War? Then, as always, we prevailed, but by the skin of our teeth. Ron Paul’s program is an American version of the Iranian desire to return to a world of Islamic purity that never existed, any more than did a golden age of American isolationism.

[...]

Of course, the mullahs would have nothing without the global economy; after oil, Iran exports nothing but pistachios and carpets. Without foreign oil companies, the mullahs could not drill, pump, or ship their hydrocarbons. The whole apparatus of Iranian Islam is a theme park, an Shi’ite Disneyland funded by oil revenues, perpetuating a barbaric society that could not feed itself without global demand for the natural resources that, by unlucky accident, happen to be located in Iranian territory.

Mullah Paul voices the same fear and resentment in its milder American form. He has in common with the Iranians a desire to make the world go away, and a fixed idea that an evil conspiracy brought about all the problems. Ron Paul isn’t an Iranian, to be sure; he’s just the closest an American can come to thinking like an Iranian without actually moving there.

[...]

Americans have the mother of all hangovers. Only five years ago, a community college dropout could get a real estate or mortgage broker’s license and make reasonably good money, and buy a McMansion with a liar’s loan. Now the Boomers are facing retirement on a fraction of the home equity that used to form their nest eggs. Ron Paul speaks not to the highways and the hedges, but to the subdivisions and shopping malls, the spawn of Chinese savings and cheap Chinese consumer goods, monuments to America’s dependence on the world economy — and he preaches isolationism.

America has the capacity to come back, and the proof is that the sector of the American economy that is most engaged with the world — the S&P 500 corporations — is showing strong gains in employment, sales, productivity and profits. Cutting taxes and rolling back regulation will restore economic growth, although the benefits may not be as broadly felt as during past recoveries. Meanwhile the rate of innovation redoubles, and brings us into uncharted territory. A friend called my attention to this video prepared by Sony for its 2009 shareholders’ meeting, which is worth viewing as a reminder.

We have to roll up our sleeves and compete in the world economy. If we try to wall the world off, we will be poor, miserable, and ultimately insecure, as nuclear weapons work their way into terrorist hands. And we will deserve what we get.

A Denver police officer fired for driving 88 mph above the speed limit while intoxicated has appealed his dismissal, arguing that the penalty is unfair and overly harsh.

Derrick Curtis Saunders, who had previously been cleared of charges he pointed a gun at a McDonald’s employee in 2009, was arrested for speeding and DUI by the Colorado State Patrol. He couldn’t be reached for comment Wednesday.

[...]

Saunders’ appeal to the Denver Civil Service Commission asserts that Martinez’s findings and penalties are “unfounded and/or unsupported by the facts” and violate principles of fundamental fairness.

The penalty is “disproportionate to the offenses alleged and/or is excessive so as to be punitive rather than corrective in nature,” according to the appeal, filed by the Denver Police Protective Association’s lawyers.

... it’s not surprising that a generic Republican is finally doing well:

Rick Santorum is a contender in Iowa.

Following speculation that the former Pennsylvania senator was poised for a surge, a string of recent polls confirms Santorum is moving in the right direction at just the right time. The presidential candidate told Fox News on Thursday he's looking to defy expectations next week, and turn around a campaign that until now was practically tied for last place.